BibGlimpse: the light-weight literature manager based on Webglimpse

The BibGlimpse application provides a light-weight PDF reprint manager
with automated bibliography retrieval for most PubMed listed
papers, allowing scientists to create, manage, and share their
personal collections of annotated reprints. Building on
WebGlimpse, it inherits sophisticated structured full text search.

Unique features

Personal collections and annotation support. Groups of
researchers can compile subject or project specific collections
of manuscripts, and manage and share these annotated content
enriched collections for collaborative literature
research. Public repositories lack both these features.

Building on WebGlimpse, simple and complex queries are permitted:
misspellings can be tolerated if requested (approximate
matching). WebGlimpse queries further support phrase
search, soundex search, and regular expressions.
Logical operators (AND, OR, NOT) and constraints (like NEAR)
are available for construction of complex queries.

Coverage is only limited by what files a researcher has access
to. Manuscripts not listed in PubMed or elsewhere can also be annotated and
searched. This is particularly interesting for technical reports,
which have not been abstracted, as well as articles which are only
available through subscriptions (for example all Elsevier titles and all recent papers by Oxford University Press are not accessible by
Google Scholar).

Light-weight and ease of day-to-day use. Indexing and
retrieval of bibliographic records (matches 95% of PubMed
listed papers) is fully automatic and transparent. Reprints can be
added with a simple upload button (no forms to be filled), or by just
saving the PDF file to the appropriate network folder. References can
then be searched or exported in MedLine or BibTeX formats for
citation or reference managers.

Built to support value-added content. Making use of
WebGlimpse structured queries, we support multiple fields, which can
be searched individually or transparently together. Fields supported
out of the box are bibliographic record, user
annotation, and the full text of the paper. Making these
available in plain text files allows, however, easy integration with
external tools, particularly text-mining. It is known that
mining of full text articles can extract more information than
available only in abstracts. Making user annotation generally
available to mining tools, which is content rich and can spell
out knowledge implicit in the paper, is expected to
significantly further improve performance. Results of such tools can
be made available as additional fields for queries. While BibGlimpse does
not itself provide such tools it has been designed to allow straightforward
integration.

We have compiled a feature comparison with other popular tools, indicating the special niche filled by BibGlimpse.

Installation

Additional Notes

User friendlyness in every day use was a key criterion in the
development of BibGlimpse: So to add a new PDF file to an existing
BibGlimpse archive, it is sufficient to save it to an indexed directory.
BibGlimpse will all by itself take care about obtaining the correct
bibliography from PubMed. There is no typing of author names or journal
titles required. Just saving the PDF file to disk and adding some
personal comment or annotation, if one likes, is enough to add the file
to the archive. BibGlimpse will automatically provide appropriate
Medline and BibTeX records for each PDF and it will consequently render
the whole collection full-text searchable. Note that BibGlimpse does
support structured queries. Queries for an author name can thus be
limited to the bibliography field and will not produce hits from the
references in the full-text for example. This is a considerable
advantage over simple full-text searches on a number of PDF reprints.
By virtue of the underlying Webglimpse search software, every paper can
therfore conveniently be recalled and annoted, domain specific PDF
collections of whole research groups can be turned into powerful
knowledge databases.

One will not have to change his way of literature research for
BibGlimpse, but BibGlimpse will definitely change how one benefits from
the papers he and his collaborators have found. For a demo PDF archive
and more details about the sophisticated Medline retrieval please see
the BibGlimpse supplement
page. In case you encounter any difficulties using BibGlimpse please
contact Thomas Tuechler, bibglimpse08[at]boku.ac.at.